Hybrid Italians, Diasporic Africans: Who's/Whose Meticcio?

In this essay I examine discourses of race and nation in contemporary Italian representations of African-ness and cultural hybridity. In particular, I devote attention to an analysis of Erminia Dell'Oro's commercially successful Italian novel L'abbandono, Una Storia Eritrea (1991), which depicts Italy's colonial history in Eritrea primarily through protagonists of Eritrean-Italian ancestry. Dell'Oro's novel, a progressive revision of Italian colonial literature, invokes the memory of Italy's Eritrean colonial ventures within the current cultural context and tumult of Italy's burgeoning multiculturalism. However, L'abbandono's representation of nationhood in relation to "meticcio" status simultaneously constructs a narrative of African-ness and Italian-ness in line with xenophobic reactions, one that naturalizes nationality in relation to biological race, and thus defines hybridity in terms of racial and national essentialism. I explore the reception of recent African immigration into Italy in the context of this popular representation of historical relations between Eritrea and Italy, as well as in relation to Italy's broader historical concern with Africa. I argue that recent immigration is but one part of a long history of African Diasporas as I call attention to material contradictions in the logics of presuming cultural hybridity/multiculturalism as a site of mutually porous boundaries.

Dell'Oro's novel relates the history of colonialism primarily through the struggles of Sellass, an Eritrean woman, and her daughter Marianna of an Italian father, Carlo. In summary, Sellass falls in love with Carlo, an Italian in Eritrea during Mussolini's Ethiopian colonization project. During Carlo's years there, they live together and have two children, Gianfranco and Marianna. Subsequently, Carlo leaves as the empire collapses, and Sellass is left to fend for herself and her children. Both of her children, especially Marianna, grapple with their meticcio status.

Sellass's economic struggles cause her to feel utter degradation as she finally becomes a domestic for a white family. For her, this position invokes daily the bitter realization of her inability to adhere to the warning her own family had proffered, that she never be a slave to white people. Much like the colonial-period song that appears in the text, Faccetta nera, which likens African women to slaves at the same time as it promises that Italian soldiers would cherish them as slaves of love, Sellass must face the reality that her domestic slavery resonates with her failure to grasp the slavery imposed by the colonial dictate of her subordinate status in her romance with Carlo.

Sellass finds her self-identity trapped between sexual service and domestic service. At this point Dell'Oro portrays Sellass, in turn, becoming an abusive parent. Marianna suffers the brunt of this verbal and physical abuse as she reminds Sellass of Marianna's father, Carlo. With Sellass's emotional and mental demise, Marianna then becomes the main protagonist of the novel, ultimately acquiring an Italian surname and then citizenship. Marianna then immigrates to Italy against Sellass's wishes. Sellass, then, briefly resumes her position as the main protagonist of the novel after Marianna leaves. This return to Sellass's story functions as a narrative means of recounting through Sellass's life the remaining history of the thirty years of strife between Eritrea and Ethiopia after the Italians and British finally left. The novel ends with a return to Marianna's story by recounting the results of her search for her father, Carlo, once she settles in Italy.

Italy's current multiculturalism is often solely explained in terms of the impact of recent unprecedented immigration into Italy as an engine of tremendous social change. As some observers have suggested, this immigration has so changed the face of Italy that it is no longer possible to assume a monoracial or monocultural Italian national character. Quite the opposite is posited; in fact, Italy can now only be seen as an emerging multicultural nation.² Indeed, it is the 1996 public fuss over Denny Mendez's victory as Miss Italy, and her status as being black with ancestry from the Dominican Republic, that has been cited more than once as...